This week had a strong clearing space energy to it.
Not in the sense of bold new beginnings or fresh starts, but in the quieter, less Instagrammable way: finishing things, tidying edges, and letting go of what no longer needs to be carried forward. Less about acceleration, more about reduction.
French writer and fellow airport departure lounge regular Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote that perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. That line kept resurfacing for me this week, not as an abstract ideal, but as a practical reality. Editing rather than drafting. Removing rather than accumulating. Accepting that some things have done their job.
Some of that showed up as work. Some of it looked suspiciously like procrastination. Some of it was simply recovery after intensity. All of it, in one way or another, was about making space. Mentally, professionally, and occasionally quite literally.
This week at work
We submitted the final three chapters of Digital Communications at Work. After months of living with these ideas — in offices, airports, trains, hotel rooms, borrowed desks, co-working spaces, OneNote thought-dumps, half-finished Notes apps, a thousand Teams chats, Slack messages, voice notes, screenshots of whiteboards, comments in Word, comments on comments, and the occasional “I’ll remember this later” (I did not) — the moment of pressing send on the email to the publisher was an odd mix of momentous and underwhelming.
The chapters focus on the unglamorous but decisive end of the digital workplace lifecycle:
Launching channels — not as a moment, but as a process. How organisations communicate value, build habits, and avoid the familiar post-launch fade where “new” quietly becomes “ignored”.
Measurement and management — moving beyond vanity metrics and zombie stats towards evidence that actually helps teams make better decisions, course-correct, and earn trust over time.
What’s next — less about shiny tools, more about the slow forces reshaping work: demographic change, automation, trust erosion, and what all of that means for internal communication as a profession.
The book is no longer hypothetical. It exists now as something that has to survive editing, disagreement, and the uncomfortable process of being read by people who weren’t in my head when I wrote it.
Also this week
With a book deadline looming, I indulged in a familiar form of productive procrastination and cleared out my wardrobe.
It’s a decade since I left my last corporate job. The pandemic killed off the corporate suit for me and, it appears, consulting more generally. And yet some things had been hanging in there for years — not because I wore them, but because of what they might one day be for.
Maybe I’d go back into corporate. Maybe future-me would finally be that person.
On the floor lay the ghosts of a life past… and a few imagined futures that never quite happened.
There was also something telling about how easy it was to part with things that are now too big — a decisiveness I notably did not show in the opposite direction.
Undeniably work avoidance, yes. But also an oddly appropriate companion to a week spent finishing a book about legacy, change, and what we choose to carry forward.
Consuming
📺 Watching
After a week of intense writing, thinking, and deadline-brain, I deliberately switched my higher functions off and let television do its thing.
I watched the entire second series of Welcome to Wrexham and became genuinely, embarrassingly invested in the fortunes of a football team in a town I’ve never visited and, realistically, probably never will. It’s an object lesson in narrative engineering: take stakes, characters, time, and a sense of shared jeopardy, and you can make anyone care about anything. Football is almost incidental.
And like any good Swiftie, I watched the first two episodes of the The End of an Era docuseries released on Disney+ on Friday. I was caught off guard by how emotional it made me, reliving a tour that already feels oddly historic. There’s something about watching collective experience back through a screen — tens of thousands of people moving in sync, night after night — that hits harder in retrospect than it does in the moment.
I also started knitting again — largely while watching all of the above. I’m still objectively terrible at it, but it turns out keeping my hands occupied is an effective way to stop myself doom-scrolling through the credits. Parallel processing, but make it wool.
🎧 Listening
In a similar spirit, my listening was entirely functional rather than aspirational. A heady mix of cheerful pop and various flavours of ADHD Focus Music on Spotify — deployed less for deep work than for emotional regulation. Not taste so much as task support.
Connections
Earlier in the week, I met up with my old mate Peter Morley, now Head of Communications at AI infrastructure darling Nebius. He filled me in on life inside a company in genuine hypergrowth; I filled him in on the correct way to eat bitterballen.
Peter also introduced me to a former Nebius colleague, Anna Fedosova, who’s now building an HR startup tackling an achingly familiar problem: keeping policies and compliance current across multiple geographies and fast-changing legislation.
I took a selfie afterwards but, in my haste, failed to check whether my eyes were actually open in it. In retrospect, a fairly accurate metaphor for the week ahead.
Peter, Anna and me (with my closed eyes fixed by Google Gemini with a surprising degree of competence)
Coverage
I appeared in two industry publications this week, both circling a familiar theme: cutting through noise.
In InComms, I shared practical advice on making LinkedIn work for you without becoming beholden to the algorithm — focusing on voice, format, and visibility that serves real professional goals rather than platform theatrics.
And in HR Grapevine, I contributed to a piece looking beyond the usual AI-heavy trend forecasts for 2026, arguing instead for closer collaboration between HR and internal communications, and for designing change that people can actually understand and act on.
Travel
I was home all week, which felt not just pleasant but extremely necessary. No trains, no airports, no tactical packing.
This coming week I’m heading to London for a couple of meetings — my final trip of the year. I’ve got a little slack in the diary, so shout if you’re around and fancy a cuppa.
London trying its best to look festive this week.Photo by me.
I keep coming back to the same realisation this week: the future of comms isn’t just more digital. It’s more structurally complex.
Not more tools in a tidy stack. Not smarter systems in a neat ecosystem. But messier audiences, overlapping loyalties, porous identities, and workplaces that no longer contain people in the way they once pretended to. Add AI, video overload and algorithmic confidence into the mix and you don’t get clarity. You get chaos but with single sign-on.
Consider the past few days a field experiment no one asked for but everyone participated in.
This week at work
I’m currently locked in a low-grade standoff with the final chapter of the book — the one about the future of digital internal comms — which is refusing to behave like a normal chapter and instead insisting on being part travelogue, part systems theory, part group therapy session for a profession in the middle of a long, quiet identity crisis. It keeps pretending to be a chapter while actually being an accumulation of travel, interviews, unease and an unreasonable number of open browser tabs. It is, frankly, a menace.
Midweek I was back in London for the Communicate Conference, hosted by vendor Interact. It was at an Interact event, over 15 years ago, that I met my now business partner, Jonathan. So it felt oddly cyclical to be there discussing whether intranets even exist in the future.
Intranerds assemble! L-R: Lisa Riemers, Suzie Robinson, me (Sharon O’Dea) looking like I’ve been Photoshopped in at the wrong scale, Chris Tubb, Steve Bynghall. Photo by Lisa Riemers.
What I hadn’t fully anticipated was how many familiar faces I’d run into who’ve been in the intranet and comms world for as long as — and in some cases longer than — I have. Which led to a steady stream of conversations that start light and get surprisingly philosophical. The shared laugh was always the same one: everything old is new again. The same overblown vendor claims we heard fifteen years ago, now wearing an ill-fitting suit called AI.
Different nouns. Same promises waiting to be broken.
But running underneath the cynicism was something much more serious. The conversations quickly turned to how the organisations we’re working with now are structurally more complex than anything we dealt with a decade ago — layered supply chains, outsourcing, platforms, regulators, global delivery, blended workforces, algorithmic management. And at the same time, the pace of change has accelerated to the point where even seasoned teams feel permanently slightly behind their own reality.
It’s a strange duality: the tech rhetoric looping, while the organisational conditions it’s being dropped into are genuinely unprecedented. Which may explain why so many “this will finally fix it” moments keep… not fixing it.
A few highlights from the conference:
Allan Tanner opened with a session on AI and the digital workplace. A quick poll showed about two-thirds of the room using generative AI weekly, but early findings from the Gallagher State of the Sector report suggest one in three are using it without any oversight, and only 40% feel confident in their skills.
What surprised me wasn’t the numbers so much as the familiarity of them. You could lift this whole section almost intact from a conference two years ago and nobody would blink. In a field that insists it’s moving at hyperspeed, that’s… odd. Is the survey already ageing in dog years? Or are comms teams simply adopting more slowly than the hype suggests?
The idea of an AI agent-first future replacing intranets floated through the room — but the awkward ownership question still hung there, unresolved. Comms? IT? HR? When everyone owns it, no one really does.
Also: we have absolutely been here before with chatbots.
The exact example used was booking leave. The endlessly cited use case where, in theory, a bot should smoothly handle what currently requires checking a team calendar, emailing your boss, verifying your entitlement, and then logging it all in some separate HR system. That was the canonical chatbot demo when I was doing a whole series of talks on this… in 2017. That’s getting on for a decade ago. If this really is an easily solved problem, we’d be living in it by now. The fact that we aren’t tells you something important.
When the tech keeps changing but the outcome doesn’t, you’re not looking at a technology failure — you’re looking at a human systems failure.
Sam Bleazard followed with employer brand as the connective tissue between HR and marketing, using Fortnum & Mason as a case study in visual storytelling and employee voice.
Then came Tom Vollmer from Cofenster with the stat that properly landed: around 23 hours of internal video uploaded every week, versus about 10 minutes actually watched. The issue isn’t underinvestment — it’s saturation. We are not video-poor. We are video-exhausted.
I fear I have crossed a generational Rubicon because I now actively resent being asked to watch a video for an entire minute. A minute of looking. Nope. I want text I can skim while emotionally elsewhere. I want bullet points, headings, and plausible deniability. Video is no longer a medium; it’s an attention hostage situation.
AI can now generate highlights, scripts and even videos from PDFs, which is undeniably impressive. But it also raises a more troubling possibility: that we’re no longer just producing noise at scale — we’re now automating it at industrial volume.
And when people can’t even keep up with the volume of information being thrown at them, it’s hardly surprising they stop engaging with it. Cognitive overload is the silent assassin of communication.
Helen Bissett shared disengagement data from Gallup that was hard to ignore: 90% of UK employees feel disengaged at work, while over 80% practise mindfulness outside of work. People are repairing themselves in their own time because work no longer does.
But this is also where I felt a quiet friction forming with some of our default assumptions. Engagement is treated as the unquestioned North Star — yet I’ve just spent weeks in Japan, a country consistently cited as having low employee engagement, alongside high levels of personal life satisfaction.
It left me, once again, with a nagging sense that we may not always be chasing the right thing.
The closing case study from AMS took an 11-page PDF innovation brief and turned it into an intranet takeover with storytelling, countdowns and discussion. Strong results. But what stuck with me was structural: AMS staff often hold dual loyalty, to the company that employs them and the client organisation they sit inside. It’s a pattern on the rise: the audience for “internal” comms is often not internal at all.
Across the day, the pattern repeated: AI, video, employer brand, purpose — all accelerating. But the deeper shift isn’t technological. It’s structural. Our audiences are fragmenting, our channels are multiplying, and the idea of a single, coherent “employee experience” is becoming more theoretical than real.
Oh, and we unexpectedly landed a juicy new client. Entirely unplanned. Entirely welcome <stares at impending HMRC bill>. All systems go.
Also this week
I went to the WB-40 Christmas dinner in London. WB-40 is a podcast about how tech reshapes work, with an associated Signal group that might genuinely be the friendliest place on the internet. It was lovely to see people properly, in three dimensions, after years of being avatars in each other’s phones.
And it left me with a question I can’t quite shake: what if low engagement at work isn’t always a failure? What if, in some cases, it’s a boundary?
It certainly maps, subjectively at least, to my own experience of the last decade. I haven’t had a “proper job” in years, and I don’t look to work for belonging, identity or community in the way I once did. Those needs are met elsewhere now — through friendships, networks, odd little internet corners, shared projects.
So if people can have rich lives, strong identities and real community without work being the emotional centre of gravity, is “more engagement at work” always the right thing to chase? Or are we sometimes trying to re-inflate a social and psychological role that work can no longer credibly carry?
That Japan contrast keeps needling at me. Maybe the problem isn’t that people are disengaged from life. Maybe they’re disengaging from work — deliberately.
Some of the most important people in my life mostly exist as glowing rectangles in my pocket. Which feels odd to admit, and yet it’s completely true.
Which made the next thing I went to this week land even harder: a talk on psychological safety with Ania Hadjdrowska — and instead of feeling theoretical, it felt uncomfortably operational.
Because in a world of hybrid teams, async work, platform hopscotch and digital performativity, psychological safety now shows up (or doesn’t) first in online behaviour:
Who speaks in the channel
Who stays silent
Who only reacts with emojis
Who disappears entirely
In remote and hybrid work, participation is visibility. Silence is no longer just silence. It’s interpreted as disengagement, resistance, risk, apathy. Often unfairly. Often reductively.
The classic barriers still apply:
Fear of judgement
Fear of exclusion
Fear of conflict
But digital work amplifies all three. You don’t get tone-of-voice buffers. You don’t get corridor repairs. You don’t get the quiet reassurance of eye contact after a risky comment lands badly. Everything is logged, screenshot, searchable. Mistakes feel permanent. So people calculate. And then they don’t speak.
Before the rational brain catches up, the amygdala scans for threat — hierarchy, tone, uncertainty. If it detects danger, it triggers fight, flight, freeze or fawn. No one innovates when they’re being emotionally chased by a tiger. And no one meaningfully collaborates when every contribution feels reputationally risky.
Psychological safety, as defined by Amy Edmondson, is the belief that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes. Not agreement, but constructive disagreement.
That matters even more when:
Teams are distributed
Trust is assumed rather than built
People meet as avatars before they meet as humans
Employment relationships are shorter, looser, more conditional
We are asking people to be brave in systems that increasingly give them no margin for error.
The line I can’t shake is still this: silence is expensive. In digital workplaces especially, it quietly drains collaboration, learning, innovation and belonging — while looking, misleadingly, like “everything’s fine.”
And that “booking leave” example kept needling at me again. Such a small task, yet it still demands procedural obedience, reputation management, tool-hopping and emotional calibration. Multiply that across a working life and you start to see why people are tired — and why AI keeps stalling on exactly the same rocks.
Layer on the social media disinhibition effect (performance, oversharing, dunking, provocation) and it doesn’t always switch off at work. When trust thins, people retreat into safer containers: private chats, external networks, side communities. Belonging migrates. Collaboration fragments. Comms gets harder.
Consuming
(Keeping this bit short this week cos I’ve wittered on above)
Like the rest of the planet, my listening week was dominated by the release of Spotify Wrapped — the global ritual in which an algorithm holds up a mirror and everyone pretends to be surprised by what’s staring back.
Once again, mine was a window into my not-so-secret pop shame. I had solemnly vowed that Taylor Swift would not dominate my Top 10 this year. And then she went and released a banger. And Lily Allen casually dropped the confessional of the decade. What’s a woman supposed to do?
Once again, I will not be sharing my list with the wider world.
Spotify also informed me that my “listening age” is 46. I am 45 and a half, thank you very much. I refuse to be aged up by an algorithm.
Connections
Staying with the theme of where community actually lives these days, I also met up with Jenny Watts — a mainstay of another of my favourite online communities, the old FitFam crowd.
Jenny Watts and me
FitFam started life years ago on Twitter: a loose group of people talking about health and fitness, cheering each other on with our running times, gym attempts and “I went for a walk instead of lying face down on the sofa” victories. It was low-key, kind, and weirdly effective.
Given the descent of Twitter into a hate-filled sewer, the group’s now migrated to WhatsApp. Same people, different platform. The conversations are smaller, more honest, less performative. It’s a nice reminder that while platforms come and go, the communities that matter tend to quietly pack their bags and move together.
Another small data point in the same direction: belonging is increasingly something people build around themselves, not something work hands out with a lanyard.
They shared a slice of my time in Nagasaki. Including my slightly surreal exploration of the future of work alongside a remote-controlled robot tour guide, piloted by a disabled operator elsewhere in Japan. A sentence I still can’t quite believe I get to write.
Screenshot
And yes, I am rightly smug about this. A positive mention in the FT is the biggest win you can get in this industry. It’s the comms equivalent of a Michelin star, an Olympic medal, and being retweeted by someone with an opinion column — all at once.
I will now be quietly unbearable about this for a while.
Travel
I’m going absolutely nowhere this week. An entire week without visiting an airport or getting up at the crack of dawn to catch a train. Bliss.
Next week, though, I’m back in London for the final time this year. I’m organising some drinks — if you’re around and would like to come*, give me a bell.
After six weeks in Japan, this week was all about timing — or more accurately, being completely out of sync with it. My body is convinced 4am is an excellent time to start the day. My inbox seems startled that I’m replying during daylight hours. And all the ideas I’d parked while sweating my way around Nagasaki chose this week to sit up in bed like startled toddlers.
Between jetlag, a chapter that staged a full rebellion, and Andreas Wagner’s talk on dormant innovations (apparently even grass needed 100 million years to get going), I’ve been reminded how much of this job is just… timing. When a client’s ready. When a chapter clicks. When the organisation finally notices the thing you’ve been politely suggesting since 2019.
Timing might not be everything, but this week it certainly felt like the main character.
This week at work
A lovely vote of confidence: We won a new piece of work with an existing client — always gratifying, always reassuring, and always a reminder that just doing good work is always the best marketing.
In my first week in Japan I ended up doing a pitch. It was 9pm where I was, but still 32 degrees. I had to duck out of a group dinner to join the call. I was sitting on the floor with a fan blowing behind me to partially avoid collapsing into a puddle of sweat. Somehow, we won the gig and we start work next week. So this week we’ve been getting ready to do just that.
The chapter that fought back: Got one of the earlier chapters back from our editor at Kogan Page. On reread, it just… didn’t sing. Too many lists, not enough soul, and absolutely none of the “why should anyone care?” that Jon and I bang on about. It was also far too long. So I did what any reasonable author would do: took a deep breath and decided to brutally rewrite the whole thing.
What I thought would be a quick tidy-up became two solid days of editing, trimming, rearranging, despairing, and eventually emerging triumphant. By Thursday it felt like a completely different chapter — tighter, clearer, and something I’m actually happy to put my name on. But it was a slog.
With that behind me, I finally pulled together the outline for the twelfth and final chapter of the book. Can’t quite believe we’re almost there — after months of interviews, diagrams, Japan detours, and existential questions about the future of workplace comms, the end is in sight. So I spent a chunk of the week writing up insights from Japan — drones, shrinking workforces, robot tour guides — and threading the best bits into the horizon-scanning sections.
Also this week
Went to this month’s Science and Cocktails talk by evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner, on the mystery of dormant innovations — ideas or traits that emerge long before they have any impact, sitting quietly until the environment shifts and suddenly they’re transformative.
Think grasses: they appeared, did nothing much for 100 million years, and then boom, global dominance — and the basis of most human food systems. Or bacterial genes capable of antibiotic resistance long before antibiotics existed. Or early cultural ideas and technologies that only take off when society is finally ready for them.
The tl;dr is: nature – and culture – generate far more potential than they currently need, and environments act as the “prince” that wakes these sleeping beauties when the moment is right.
It made me think about internal comms and digital workplace work: how often the “innovation” isn’t the new tool, but the dormant capability already in the organisation — the half-built governance model, the underused feature, the employee insight nobody acted on — just waiting for the right conditions, leadership, or crisis to wake it.
And, frankly, how much of my job is quietly planting seeds for things that won’t catch until the organisation shifts in the right way. A slightly humbling, slightly comforting reminder that timing is half the craft.
Aside from that, I had a quiet week back in Amsterdam. Woke up at 4am several times, which is perfect if you’re a monk; less so if you’re merely someone who made poor timezone choices.
Cultural re-entry has hit me at odd times, mostly when tired. I nearly bowed at multiple Dutch people, but have avoided saying arigato gozaimasu at anyone (so far).
I’m playing catch-up on socials, sorting through thousands of photos and ten times as many memories. Realised I now possess 400 photos of fruit-shaped bus stops. No plan for them. Yet.
Consuming
👩🏻💻 Internetting
Two very different takes on the future of internal comms collided in my feed on Tuesday, and the contrast was so stark it felt almost choreographed.
Unily’s view is the one most people in big, complicated organisations will recognise: grounded, sensible, measured.
The world of incremental improvements: a bit less friction, a bit more governance, modest, polite steps toward AI, progress paced by budget cycles and risk committees. And honestly, that’s where most digital workplaces genuinely are. The average intranet of 2026 won’t look wildly different from its 2016 ancestor — and that’s fine. Evolution has value.
Klein, meanwhile, is squinting at an entirely different horizon. His lens: AI compressing decision cycles, dissolving management layers, accelerating knowledge loss, reshaping coordination itself. Less “optimise the comms plan”, more “your operating model may not survive contact with the next five years”.
The key thing, of course, is that both are true — just on different timescales.
But the bit we can’t wish away: AI isn’t a shiny add-on. Used badly, it could be a workplace bloodbath. Many people are understandably nervous about automating themselves out of relevance. And demographic change is already gnawing at the edges.
Japan hammered that home. Fewer workers, more automation, and a very immediate need to rethink how work gets done at all.
Small DEEx improvements still matter. They make the day-to-day tolerable. But they’re not the thing that will get us through the real shifts barrelling towards us.
If anything, the moment calls for more boldness — in how we use AI, how we explain it, and how we help people navigate what’s coming.
📺 Watching
Finger on the cultural pulse as always, I finally started Celebrity Traitors. I intended to watch one episode as a palate cleanser after a day of editing… and then resurfaced four episodes later, blinking at the clock like someone who has accidentally time-travelled.
It really is as good as everyone says: the camp, the scheming, the sheer operatic commitment to drama over absolutely nothing. It’s the kind of show that gives you whiplash from switching between “oh come on” and “I would absolutely betray every one of these people for £120k”.
No spoilers, obviously — but I am now fully invested, irrationally suspicious of everyone, and contemplating whether a roundtable on “psychological safety and betrayal in hybrid teams” might be a useful conference talk.
📚 Reading
My copy of Lisa Riemers and Matisse Hemel-Nelis’s Accessible Communications was waiting for me when I got home — a comforting sight after weeks with only my Kindle for reading company. I’d already had the pleasure of reading an advance copy earlier this year, but there’s something about holding a hard copy (a proper dead-tree edition) that makes the material land differently. Maybe it’s the weight; maybe it’s the guilt of knowing this will outlive all of us.
Re-reading it, I’m reminded what a genuinely important book this is for our industry. Too much accessibility advice for comms people is either painfully high-level (“write clearly!”) or so technical it requires a support animal. Lisa and Matisse manage to bridge that gap beautifully. They give you the principles and the practicalities, without ever making you feel lectured or incompetent.
What I love most is that they treat accessibility not as a compliance box to tick, but as core craft — part of what it means to be good at communication, full stop. They weave in examples, checklists, real-world scenarios, and the kinds of small, humane decisions comms people make a hundred times a day but rarely interrogate.
For anyone working in internal comms, content design, digital workplace, HR, UX, or frankly anywhere words meet humans: it’s one of those books you’ll keep within arm’s reach and quietly force on colleagues. Highly recommend.
🎧 Listening
Lily Allen’s new album has been on repeat in my ears since it dropped last month. I keep intending to listen to something else — a podcast, a serious audiobook, literally anything that would make me seem more intellectual — and then five seconds later I’m back in Lily-land, tapping away like a woman possessed. 10/10, no notes.
Travel
I’m heading to London this week for the Communicate conference. Looking forward to seeing some of my favourite intranerds in 3D. If you’re coming, say hello — or buy me a coffee if you’d like to hear about robot tour guides.
A week of motion and mixed emotions: gratitude, nerves, excitement. Paris one day, Japan the next. I keep catching myself thinking how lucky I am — and then immediately worrying I sound insufferable for saying so.
The truth is, I am grateful. I get to do things my younger self could never have imagined. But I’m also anxious, tired, feeling guilty and slightly overwhelmed. Big changes always come with a wobble, even the good ones.
This week at work
Still a quiet one. Began the final tranche of chapters for the book. Prepped for Japan. Did some thinking about (organisational) transformation.
Spent some time with an firm doing a discovery in a complex, multi-national setup, helping them to make sense of what they’ve seen and heard. Like many such organisations, they’re trying to find the right balance between central control, consistency and governance — and giving local teams the freedom and flexibility to create relevant content and experiences. In our experience, good governance balances both: standards set centrally, freedom within a framework. And an acceptance that, much as you’d like to, sometimes it’s best to control the things you can change and accept the things you can’t.
We also started ramping up work on a project that’s kicking off soon. Less positively, another proposal got bounced. The market’s pretty tough for everyone right now, I know, but I’m really feeling it right now.
Also this week
I went all the way to Paris for an exercise class. Which is, however I spin it, a ridiculous thing to do. The bonkers class I go to in Amsterdam announced a one-off special at Sainte-Chapelle — that extraordinary 13th-century jewel box of stained glass, in the city my grandmother called home. So I blagged a ticket and went.
I danced to Florence and the Machine in silent-disco headphones, gazing up at the kaleidoscope of light and thinking of all the history those windows have witnessed. During the meditation at the end, I lay on my back listening to Alan Watts’ Dream of Life speech:
“Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further and further-out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally you would dream where you are now — the dream of living the life that you are actually living today. That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have.”
Somewhere between Paris and Tokyo, that line landed hard. What was once a dream really is the life I get to live — and I’m grateful for every improbable, ridiculous bit of it.
Consuming
📺 Watching
Rewatched Princess Mononoke to get in the Japan mood (after last week’s Silence misery-fest). Looking forward to seeing some Ghibli-esque landscapes in the Goto Islands this week.
📚 Reading
Made some slow progress on Blood in the Machine. Still grimly fascinating. A reminder that every technological revolution, from the Luddites to AI, comes with winners, losers and a lot of noise in between.
🎧 Listening
Still have Life of a Showgirl on repeat, but after hearing Alan Watts in the Sanctum class I’ve been deep-diving into more of his speeches on Spotify. Here’s the playlist — perfect plane-listening for big thoughts somewhere over the ‘stans.
Coverage
Had a flurry of messages this week telling me that a provocative LinkedIn post I wrote a few months back — asking if enterprise social networks are over — was being used by Kim England to open her talk at the Unite conference in Nashville.
When you send things out into the internet, you’re never quite sure if you’re sparking debate or just belming into the void. So it’s lovely to hear when something actually lands — and even better when it sparks thoughtful replies and reflection months later.
Turns out being a twat on the internet isn’t a total waste of time after all.
Connections
Met up with campaigner and growth hacker Pranay Manocha as he was passing through Amsterdam this week. We talked Brexit, passport privilege, growth, social media toxicity (and balanced it all out with a few Amsterdam beers).
Travel
I’m writing this 39,000 feet over Asia, midway through a 24-hour, three-flight travel day. I’ll land in Tokyo in four hours and be in Nagasaki by the afternoon. My bag’s still in Paris, so I’m reluctantly piloting a minimalist approach to packing. Wish me luck. I fear I will need it.
Aside from that, looking forward to exploring my new city and meeting the other nomads on the trip, starting with a ferry to the Goto Islands.
Excited to explore, learn, get lost and find something new. Or, at the very least, buy some clean clothes. I’ll share it all here.
Some weeks feel like a hinge — the quiet click between what was and what comes next. This was one of them. Projects paused, others reignited, the to-do list reshuffled yet again. A reminder that most progress doesn’t look like momentum; it looks like waiting, adjusting, packing, planning.
Autumn’s fully arrived in Amsterdam, ushered in by the season’s first storm, Amy. All wind, rain, and sideways bikes. Bleak, but bracing. There’s a certain kind of forward motion in the colder air: the sense that the year’s winding down, and it’s time to get things finished, filed, or flung into motion before winter properly settles in.
The trees along the canals have started to turn, the light’s gone soft and golden, and the air smells faintly of woodsmoke and deadlines. It feels like the season for tying up loose ends — wrapping edits, clearing decks, and sketching out what’s next.
For me, that’s Japan. It’s suddenly just days away: a shift in season, continent, and perspective all at once. The perfect point, perhaps, to pause and take stock before the next chapter properly begins.
This week at work
A quieter one, though not without its twists. Two proposals we’d been hopeful about got knocked back — not lost to anyone else, just shelved as client plans shifted. Always frustrating when work evaporates for reasons outside your control, but that’s consulting life: sometimes you’re sprinting to meet a deadline, sometimes you’re rearranging the post-its and waiting for the next wave to break.
Happily, another project that wasn’t due to start until next year has come roaring back into view, so the pendulum swings both ways. If there’s a lesson in all this, it’s that flexibility isn’t just a virtue in this job — it’s survival.
Between that and chipping away at edits for the book (slowly, steadily, like a glacier), I’ve been getting ready for the Japan trip; finalising logistics, lining up interviews, and reaching out to people I’ll be speaking with while I’m there. It’s shaping up to be a fascinating few weeks of research, conversations, and new perspectives — and, hopefully, a bit of inspiration to carry back home.
He spoke about how societies evolve not through steady progress but through short, chaotic bursts — moments when old systems destabilise and new ones start to take shape. The idea of “transitions” was framed as both inevitable and hopeful: collapse as transformation, not just destruction.
There were plenty of sharp takeaways: that our economy’s dependence on perpetual growth is fundamentally unsustainable; that our obsession with technological “fixes” is often an implementation illusion masking the need for deeper change; and that the real barrier is not resources or technology, but imagination — we’ve forgotten how to picture alternatives to extractive growth.
The phrase that stuck with me most: “Transition is a more hopeful form of collapse.” A useful lens, perhaps, not just for climate policy but for any complex system — from organisations to the digital workplace.
Also, I can confirm that lectures are vastly improved when preceded by smoky cocktails and a funk band.
Consuming
📺 Watching
With less than a week to go until I head to Nagasaki, I thought I’d give Silence — Martin Scorsese’s 2016 film about the Christian missionaries who came to Japan in the 17th century — a go. That was an error.
It’s a punishingly joyless three hours of mud, martyrdom, and men staring meaningfully into the middle distance while being slowly crushed by the weight of their own faith (and, occasionally, actual rocks). It’s beautifully shot, of course (Scorsese can’t help himself) but it’s the cinematic equivalent of flagellation: grim, ponderous, and utterly devoid of warmth or light.
By the end I wasn’t enlightened; I just wanted someone, anyone, to shout, “Cut! Enough suffering, lads!” I suspect the real silence here was my will to live slipping quietly away.
If the goal was to get me in the mood for Japan, it failed spectacularly — though it did make me grateful for central heating, antibiotics, and the fact that nobody’s currently boiling Christians in Nagasaki Bay.
📚 Reading
After listening to a podcast about the Levellers — the 17th-century political movement, not the 90s crusty band — I picked up Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant. It traces the parallels between the early industrial revolts of the Luddites and today’s tech-driven upheavals, arguing that resistance to automation isn’t anti-progress but a fight for dignity and agency.
I’m about a third of the way through and impressed so far. It’s well-researched, surprisingly pacey, and full of eerie echoes: the concentration of power, the myth of innovation as inherently good, the way workers’ rights get trampled in the name of efficiency. You could swap the textile mills for data centres and the rhetoric would barely need editing.
It’s one of those books that makes you glance uneasily at your laptop and wonder which side of history you’re really on.
🎧 Listening
On Thursday my bestie and I caught the sold-out final show of Little Simz at AFAS — the North London rapper, actor, and all-round force of nature. She was magnetic: precise, powerful, utterly in command, with a crowd that sang every word back in adoration.
But the week’s real soundtrack belonged to Taylor Swift, whose much-anticipated new album dropped on Friday. I devoured it immediately. Unconvinced at first, but by the time of writing it had properly lodged itself under my skin — the kind of slow-burner that keeps revealing new layers every listen.
Saturday morning saw me at a special “Swiftie Saturday” spin class — 66 of us belting along on stationary bikes like a pop-powered peloton — and by evening I was at the cinema for the album launch film. Immersion therapy, basically.
It’s not a cult. It’s a group of like-minded individuals engaging in synchronised cardio and light emotional processing.
Connections
I had the pleasure of catching up with Amsterdam-Canadian communicator Cassie Jorgensen this week. We chatted about the challenges of building a professional network as a blow-in from another country and the merits of agency vs in-house.
Travel
Six days till Japan (and two of those involve a side-quest to Paris). Packing lists are being honed, chargers located, adapters counted, and contingency plans made in case the airline decides my suitcase needs a longer layover than I do.
This trip has come around quickly, but it feels like the right moment for it: the book nearing its final stretch, work shifting gears, the season turning. If this week’s talk on transitions had a message, it’s that change rarely happens neatly — it’s messy, unpredictable, often inconvenient — but also full of possibility if you keep your eyes open.
I’ll be spending the first week between Nagasaki and the Goto Islands, talking to people about how work, technology, and community are evolving in Japan — a country that’s long been living the future the rest of us are only now stumbling towards.
More on that next week, from the other side of the world.
Some weeks are about routine, others about momentum. This one was about spotting opportunities and grabbing them before they slip past.
As Seneca put it: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” I’ve never been much for masterplans — my career has been more patchwork than roadmap — but I’ve learned that when the right thing comes along, you say yes and work the rest out later.
And while there’s a bigger adventure brewing in the background, the week itself had plenty to get stuck into closer to home.
This week at work
The book keeps marching forward, as has the season. Amsterdam has taken a sudden autumnal turn, the light thinner, the mornings chillier. The shift feels like a metaphor: the year heading into its final quarter just as the book does. Another week, another chunk wrangled into something that (hopefully) resembles prose. This time I’ve been working on the chapters that shift from platforms to messy and unpredictable people, which means wrestling both with frameworks and with the practical realities of how organisations actually operate. Let’s just say it’s one thing to cite the Barcelona Principles, it’s another to translate them into something a harried comms team can actually use on a Tuesday afternoon.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about multilingual content. European Day of Languages was a neat reminder that we default far too often to the assumption that “everyone speaks English.” They don’t, and even when they do, it’s rarely the language of the heart. For intranets and employee comms that aspire to feel genuinely inclusive, that means more than slapping machine translation on your news pages—it means designing governance, content types, and workflows that respect linguistic diversity from the outset. I’ve blogged about that here.
Back from holiday I’ve also thrown myself back into Statement, focusing on the narrative and comms. The app’s core idea — authenticity through verified transactions — is resonating, but the story around it needs to land as strongly as the product itself. So I’ve been sharpening the positioning, and working out how to talk about Statement in a way that’s both clear and compelling.
Towards the end of the week I virtually sat down with Jack Aspden from The Company You Keep to talk about my career. Which will never not be funny to me, as (as I wrote about in Week 28) I’ve been working for over a quarter of a century and am still to have anything close to a plan. My career is less a trajectory and more a Jackson Pollock spray-painted across a life. A series of (occasionally good) decisions and some sheer dumb luck. We spoke for over an hour, a conversation that felt more like a session with a therapist at times. I wish him the best of luck editing that into something resembling useful career advice. As Helen Keller said, “Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing at all.”
Finally, proposals. We have a couple on the go, in that place where we kick them back and forth between us and the client until the shape of the project feels right. This where I get excited about the work itself and slightly queasy about the potential workload if they all land at once. It’s the consultant’s eternal dilemma: complain about the pipeline being too quiet, then panic when it starts filling.
Also this fortnight
Remember back in Weeknote 38 when I said I had some big news? Here it is: I’m off to Japan.
Starting next month I’ll spend a few weeks living and working there as part of a digital nomads programme with the Prefecture of Nagasaki. It’s a proper experiment in how regions can attract and support place-independent workers — and for me, a live case study in the future of work.
Japan is already grappling with challenges others are only just waking up to: ageing populations, shrinking talent pools, automation, AI, and the redesign of work for wellbeing and productivity. Those forces shape our comms, processes and platforms — the digital workplace is just a mirror of that reality, and the reflection is shifting fast.
I’ll be based mainly in Nagasaki (with some time on the Ghibli-esque Goto Islands) before wrapping up in Tokyo. I’ll keep client work ticking along (just seven hours in the future), while also writing, researching, and learning from innovators, business leaders and fellow nomads.
The future of work is being written everywhere. For a few weeks, my chapter will be from Japan.
If you know of anyone doing interesting things in the comms, collaboration or future of work space in Japan or the broader APAC region, I’d be grateful for an intro.
Consuming
👩🏻💻 Internetting
Unusually for this section, a podcast. WB40 is a long-running show about tech, but what makes it special is the community around it: regular listeners who are collaborative, generous, and always up for sharing advice.
This week’s episode features my friend — and occasional Lithos Partners associate — Lisa Riemers, talking about her new book Accessible Communications. I was lucky enough to get an advance copy, and I love how she and her co-author Matisse Hamel-Nelis not only make the case for accessibility in comms, but show how achievable it can be.
Listen in… and then go and buy the book.
📺 Watching
I dipped into Alice in Borderland on Netflix, partly to whet my appetite for all things Japan. It started off promising — stylish, intriguing, Tokyo-as-character — but it veered into Squid Game territory faster than I expected. Not sure yet if I’m hooked or just mildly traumatised.
📚 Reading
Somehow didn’t have much of a book mojo this week.
🎧 Listening
Bret McKenzie’s new album turned out to be an unexpected treat. Best known as one half of Flight of the Conchords, he’s gone solo here with something warmer and more musically layered. I put it on out of curiosity and ended up staying for the melodies — witty, yes, but also surprisingly tender. Proof there’s more to him than business time.
Travel
Nothing at all this week, and ngl I’m delighted about that.
It’s over five years since Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg predicted email is probably going away, and yet I returned from holiday this week to a bulging inbox. So what went wrong?
Here I explain why email alternatives haven’t yet made the breakthrough – and what needs to happen to really see an end to inefficient email culture.
Underestimated the need for culture change
Cultural barriers in moving from email to enterprise social have been wildly underestimated. Email has had a long (20 year +) period of dominance, and has found its way into a vast range of tasks (many of which it’s inappropriate for, but nonetheless). Old habits die hard, and email is quite some habit – taking up 28% of employee time. Intranet expert Sam Marshall once commented that only two things will survive a nuclear winter – cockroaches, and email.
Email, for all its faults, offers privacy, preservation of silos and hierarchy, and the hoarding of knowledge – all things which fit with traditional ways of managing business. For enterprise social networks to really make a difference they need to form part of a massive change management programme – one that sees the ESN as a small part of a change to make the organisation fit for the future.
If an organisation is serious about embracing openness, meritocracy, flexibility and collaborative working, as a means of making itself more agile and innovative, and engaging its people, then an ESN will enable that. But the organisation needs to lead that change – the tool is merely a means of delivery, and can’t be seen as the culture change itself.
Few organisations have done this successfully yet. Most have barely started. But as hardly a day now passes without another news story about how traditional industries and business models are being disrupted by smaller, newer players – firms who are already embracing those values and working in open, collaborative and innovative ways – big business has to adapt or die. That culture change isn’t a nice to have: it’s existential.
The tools sucked
Back in 2010, the tools to go email-free just weren’t widespread enough; few enterprises had rolled them out, and where they had they were found wanting. Let’s be blunt here: they sucked compared to what was available on the web.
Enterprise social tools lacked powerful enough functionality to make people ditch their long-held habits. They were typically rolled out organically, which meant they relied heavily on enthusiasts and failed to gain critical mass.
All that has changed, though. Social intranet products such as Sharepoint, Jive and IBM Connections have continued to grow and evolve their functionality. At the same time, products like Salesforce, Oracle and SAP have moved on from token inclusion of social functionality to offering fully social systems. And a host of new entrants like Slack have come along to shake the whole enterprise collaboration market up, forcing everyone to raise their game.
The current crop of enterprise social tools now offer substantial and realistic alternatives to email with functionality and usability that are as good as anything offered to consumers.
The challenge, then, is ensuring the organisation has the right tool or set of tools. And that means focusing on user needs…
Lacked understanding of user needs
Too many intranet projects are conceived and designed from the corporate centre, designed without a detailed understanding of how, when and why people work – so that social fits the way people work, rather than expecting people to change the way they work to use social tools.
In this (old) blogpost, Andrew McAfee suggests that the continued use of email when superior alternatives are available is an example of the 9x problem. That is, that people are generally averse to change, so they overvalue what they have by a factor of three, and undervalue alternatives by 3x. So something needs to not just be better than the alternative for people to be convinced to change, but it needs to be 9x better.
The number one driver of adoption is utility. Intranet and digital workplace professionals need first to understand what people do and how they work – and why they use email – then select and configure tools so they provide a compelling alternative – one that users perceive as genuinely useful enough to be worth investing their time in learning.
Poor integration
All too often social intranets are yet another in the plethora of workplace portals, presenting users with a hot mess of interfaces and user experiences. It’s no surprise that people reached for the comfort blanket of Microsoft Outlook.
Email dominates because it’s familiar, and it’s made its way into almost everything we do at work. Email doesn’t force people to think about what tool to use – and nor should your digital workplace. The current generation of enterprise social tools are easy and cheap to integrate with each other, and with other systems. Crack that and present a coherent, integrated digital workplace that doesn’t require users to think, and you reduce the barriers to change.
Too inward looking
Finally, they didn’t extend beyond the firewall, forcing people to go back to email if they want to collaborate with anyone outside of the organisation. In this day and age collaboration can’t just be inward-looking; it will necessarily involve third parties like agencies – and ideally customers too.
With most vendors offering robust cloud-based solutions, there’s no longer a need to limit collaboration to inside the firewall, nor to force people to go back to email to collaborate externally.
The future
These five factors can explain why predictions about the imminent demise of email have failed to come true. While the tools have improved markedly, implementations must focus on user needs so that users feel social tools are substantial and realistic alternatives to email.
As William Gibson commented, the future is here… it’s just not evenly distributed yet. While the tools now exist to deliver on Sheryl Sandberg’s prediction of an email-free future, without significant investment in culture change email will persist.
Sharon O'Dea 